The Necessary
by Karanguni
Summary: Working for Shinra during the War in Wutai and Tseng does what he wants: chooses his allegiances, who he sleeps with, what he does. Then Tseng does what he must: breaks bones, ethics and people.


The trouble with war: it was easy to start one, and hell to end it.

Five in the morning, Sector Six, inner west side. Wutai town. When your world was divided into a pie chart of localities, you defined where you were in the world by your proximity to the centre. Shinra made Midgar as easy as it made Midgar complicated; in a city with no government, it gave governance. Peace, prosperity and your preferred profession. The Shinra tower erupted like a spire from the middle of the Plate, reaching for the sky in a way that a more poetic person might have deemed almost human.

Tseng wasn't a poet. The streets outside his windows were quiet, the ever-light of nocturnal Midgar only just starting to blend into natural dawn. He drew the zip of his blazer up, and looking in the mirror saw a man where everyone else in his neighbourhood would have seen a traitor.

Latest on the net circuits: another 342 native casualties during a raid on a strategic Wutai position. Shinra had captured three bunkers worth of rebel ammunition and food stock; if they couldn't kill the damn bastards, they'd starve them out. SOLDIER suffered only three losses; one a case of friendly fire.

Tseng flicked his data reader off as he heard a rustle of noise from the bedroom. He walked in to the sight of pale skin, black hair, brown eyes like his own. Picked up from the Sector Six slums the night before; Tseng'd found himself being watched at the back of a too-popular Wutai club, his one night off suddenly gone interesting. Everywhere there'd been faces as foreign as his own, none of them recognising him for what he was, except this man - this boy, practically - who'd watched all night and come up to him and spoken to him in an accent so thick that Tseng had wondered how fresh off the trains he really was.

'They tell me,' the stranger had said into Tseng's ear over the loud crash of the music, 'that you wear a suit in the daytime.'

Who was he? Some crazy new immigrant, desperate and mad from the journey east and looking for a thrill as recommended by Midgar's more reckless citizens? Fucking with Turks was a sport attempted by few.

But it'd been too damned long since Tseng had last felt anything about anyone, and something in him wanted to take this boy home, screw him and then screw him over and then put him back together the next day: drag from him the ignorance that would have him killed in this city, be a good man for once, be generous, be human.

Tseng'd seen Zack - a SOLDIER he recognised from various mission reports - in the same club doing almost the same before, after all. And if a SOLDIER - mutant, monstrous - could dare to live, why not a Turk?

So he'd taken the stranger home - to this safe house, at least - and it'd felt like being hit with a shot of Mako and lightning and quicksilver and now it was over: the real world awoke with the dawn.

Tseng looked at the stranger in the bed, who looked at him also. 'You are,' the stranger said, in the foreign Wutainese tongue which might have been Tseng's own, in a different world. 'You are one of Shinra's. I'd heard you were. They say that life is better, in Shinra.'

'They always say that,' Tseng replied in the same language, bland.

'Can I do the same?' the stranger asked, sitting up. 'Work for Shinra?'

'Considering where you come from,' Tseng said, narrowing his eyes, 'I do not think that you really want to.'

Tseng reached into his pocket, and took out a slim wad of gil secured together with a clip. He flicked it at the stranger, and nodded once. When he spoke again, it was with a clean, purely Midgarian speech. 'Take a shower, then get out of here and go rent yourself a room somewhere clean.'

Tseng turned.

'Wait!' the stranger shouted from the bed, and why did it always have to end like this? Why did he always have to find someone with black hair and the wrong coloured eyes? Afterwards, they always wanted to believe that Tseng was some sort of kindred spirit. 'Can I see you again? I stay just next to that club, I would like it if --'

Tseng never heard any of it. He reached his office before the first, proper light of day hit the Plate - hiding, like the rest of the city, from the dull, depressing grey of the morning.

Spend enough time in the city, and you learned to live more comfortably under the cover of darkness than in the shade of the sun. Midgar was a city's city; truly unnatural, completely artificial, cold and hard from under-Plate to upper-tower and yet organic and alive from sector to sector. When your status was determined by how much sunlight you were capable of seeing, the only solidarity a citizen had was in the blanket of the night, where neon became your sun and tarmac your earth.

You may have come from anywhere, but you always belonged to Midgar, after a while. And if you belonged to Midgar, you got used to living a life as artificial as her own.

School children poured out of Shinra-funded schools at the stroke of 4 in the afternoon: changing out into the grey and black costume of the average kid, they'd spend the 6 o'clock hour daring each other to hit the slum markets, waiting only for the cover of darkness to disguise their adventures on trains and up and down the sector lines. Businessmen snuck out of offices at 7 or 8 or 9 at night, slinking into twenty-four hour canteens around the city which could afford them thirty minutes of privacy and a hot dinner at a tiny table shared with two other strangers. Lovers in arms flooded the Sector Eight streets from 10 through 12, waltzing from cinema to theatre down Loveless avenue, drunk on each other until they got drunk on Corel's finest malt while grinding the witching hours away in some dark, hot club.

Nine in the evening, Shinra Headquarters, central Midgar. Tseng pulled on his gloves, flexed his fingers, pulled his hair back out of his face, put his hands into his pockets and stepped out and into the urban jungle.

Sector Seven was the first area he passed through. The place was alive with the blare of screens and speakers: the stock markets and billboards of the afternoon morphed into the news channels and entertainment net of the late hours.

Every newscaster was on Shinra payroll, reading out endless warnings about Wutai insurgents infiltrating their city; spies who would no doubt undermine the safety of Shinra-secured homes and offices. The war had everyone at fever pitch. Each man who passed Tseng on the street seemed to turn their eyes and stare, discretely, at the foreigner who wore the dark suit that only locals knew how to fear.

Turks: the night was their time. To the lazy eye, Tseng could have been just another corporate grunt as he elbowed his way onto the train with the rush hour crowd, leaning against the window with eyes as blank and bored as the next worn-down city-dweller.

The Sector Six slums. Hundreds of feet under their richer counterparts, and the immigrants from Wutai here were as typical as the ones above ground. _Cockroaches_, Heidegger had called them, if Tseng recalled correctly. There'd been a staff meeting earlier in the day, and from across the expanse of the boardroom table, Tseng'd raised a silent eyebrow as the fat executive chuckled at his own jokes. _The Wutai are like cockroaches. Damn people just won't die._

How long had the war gone on, now? Eight years? Nine? Yet the fight was still ongoing on the western front; funded, no doubt, by the thousands of legitimate families in Midgar who all sent money to a home many had never seen. Shinra couldn't beat them, Shinra couldn't join them, Shinra couldn't just kill them all and have done with it. It was an internal embarrassment to have operatives from Wutai wriggle their way into the city. Who knew where they could be? Who knew how far they'd risen? Who knew what groups they potentially controlled, perhaps under the very nose of Shinra itself? Heidegger'd stared at Tseng, hard, and the silent accusation was more than enough. Tseng could see the resentment in the eyes of a man still bitter over the loss of two billion gil worth of departmental funds. 'I hear,' Heidegger'd continued, 'that a Turk safe house was raided this morning. Security did not manage to find the one responsible, but --'

'If your security personnel,' Tseng had interjected lightly, 'are incapable of resolving the situation, the Turks will gladly take jurisdiction. All things considered, we would like to justify that the new budget allocated to us has been well spent.' Before Heidegger could start howling, Tseng'd turned to the President, and with no show of expression on his face smoothly explained that Administrative Research had gathered certain intelligence about foreign operatives in the slums.

Heidegger wasn't above blackmail; and Tseng - Tseng wasn't above brutal force.

So there he was: ten forty two in the evening, Sector Six slums, edge-wise. From this far down and out, you could almost see the sky if you dared lean far out enough. Standing next to a club that was just beginning to come to life, waiting outside a place that he'd been to a hundred times before. Tseng did what he had to do to feel alive. And the rest of the time - he did what he had to do to stay alive.

An hour later, as the hysteria of Midgar's night came to full fruit, Tseng found his stranger, standing there in front of him like an innocent, but probably anything but. 'You came,' the stranger said, again in that language that Tseng did not, would not share.

'You stole,' was all the Turk said. The stranger came closer.

'I took what was necessary to help our cause,' the stranger replied. And Tseng could see it in his eyes: he believed, like so many of the others who came to Midgar, this man-child-immigrant-victim _believed_. Believed in fighting for Wutai, believed in doing honour to his country, believed that man could be so simple as to obey the bonds of blood and heritage. 'For Wutai.'

'Our cause,' Tseng said, quietly. 'Of course.'

The stranger followed him home again, because the shared blood of kinship - of looking the same, of coming from the same place, of bearing the same burdens - was enough for him. For Wutai.

Tseng left the broken body of that Wutai informant on the bed of that same safe house, and only took off bloodstained leather gloves when he returned to Shinra - as he always had, as he probably always would.

Two thirty four in the morning, Shinra Headquarters, Midgar City. Tseng typed his report and filed his papers and so ensured - for a little while longer, at least - that he would continue to have the power he needed to defend his men, his Turks, and himself. He showered, incinerated stained clothes, went to bed, and lost no sleep.

Tseng did what he had to do to feel alive. And the rest of the time - he did what he had to do to stay alive. 


End file.
